New Facebook Graph Search gives users power to slice and dice info from friends

Facebook's Graph Search allows users to see trends and cull information from their friends, or even friends of friends.

Florence Ion

Facebook announced a new method of sorting and consuming information disseminated on the social network at a press conference in Menlo Park, CA Tuesday. The service, called “Graph Search,” allows users to enter a query on Facebook and get answers based on cross-sections of information within their social network.

“Graph search is not Web search,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a Web search with the query “hip-hop” will present links about hip-hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

Zuckerberg described “people, photos, places, and interests” as four potential search dimensions for graph search. Zuckerberg used the intersections of these areas to see Mexican restaurants his friends had been to in the Palo Alto area, as well as to find the best-liked photo of him and his wife in order to decide which one to use on a Christmas card. Graph search queries use phrases rather than keywords: “Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter” was one example.

Facebook noted that the search could apply not only to current friends, but to people a user might have met in real life and “[wants] to meet them on Facebook.” For instance, if a user met at friend of a friend who mentioned he went to Kenyon but didn’t catch his last name, the query “People named Andrew who are friends with Jacqui and went to Kenyon” would locate him” (if his privacy settings allow him to be searchable). Facebook also hinted at the possibilities of the site as a place to get dates—simply query “Friends of friends who are single men,” ladies.

Other searches that users could conduct: friends with photos tagged in Yellowstone National Park or Paris, France; TV shows enjoyed by software engineers; bars in Dublin, Ireland that have been “liked” specifically by people who live in Dublin, Ireland.

Facebook stressed that users can only search content that has been shared with them—for instance, if it’s not in your profile that you watch Game of Thrones or you never check in to the Mexican restaurants you frequent, you’ll never appear in those searches. However, if a friend checks you in to a Mexican restaurant you attend with them and makes that post public, that will likely feed into any graph searches your friends do. Likewise, it appears that any post that is public (i.e., technically shared with every Facebook user) can be involved in a query made by any user, regardless of their degree of direct social involvement with you.

Zuckerberg highlighted the new privacy controls Facebook introduced in recent weeks. The service now allows users to batch-untag pictures or posts from an Activity Log pane on the website, as well as create a request within the same window requesting that the photo owner remove the post or picture completely.

Users who may be interested in this feature could flock to more completely fill in their interests, activities, and photos. But the opposite may also happen: users who don’t want to be involved in their friends’ searches might be compelled to scrape their profiles of salient information and start worrying about how their friends involve them by tagging them in posts, check-ins, and pictures.

Zuckerberg ended by pointing out that Facebook search also integrates with Bing, to fill in the search gaps that users may try to fulfill with graph search.

A limited beta of Facebook's graph search will begin rolling out January 16. Initially, the searches will only be able to be conducted in English (spoken by 40 percent of the service's user base), but Zuckerberg stated that Facebook was only "starting" with that language.

Facebook's event is currently in progress, and we will update this article as more details become available. For up-to-the-minute information, you can watch our liveblog.

Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a web search with the query “hip hop” will present links about hip hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

If you don't know which of your friends live in (insert city here), then maybe you should review the meaning of the word 'friend'.

Because "people whom I was previously on friendly terms with but whom I haven't talked to in a while and I want to reconnect with" takes longer to say than just "friend". Or maybe you're just interested in friends of friends.

Let's say you're interviewing for a job in Seattle and don't know anyone there. In that case, you don't need close friends. The old college classmate whom you fell out of touch with after moving to different cities ten years ago may not be a close friend but might be a Facebook "friend" and would probably suffice for purposes like providing a couch to crash on or asking questions like, "Does the weather bother you?"

They need to allow searching the posted content. Shouldn't I be able to search the posts I am able to view? Seems obvious. Instead, I go to that person's page and scroll back endlessly through time until I find it.

Exactly, this sounds like they're just taking those features public and making a big fuss about it.

Facebook continues to disappoint.

I'm not that disappointed, it looks pretty cool for people with well-connected profiles. It's going to be completely useless to me, but then I am completely useless to FaceBook with my one-friend-profile so it's only fair!

Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a web search with the query “hip hop” will present links about hip hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

If you don't know which of your friends live in (insert city here), then maybe you should review the meaning of the word 'friend'.

Sounds like an impressive technical feat and like a wet dream for advertisers. (And should be good for my facebook shares)

But ...

1) I do not want to get ads because of the stuff I like, so I think I will stop liking stuff. Its stupid anyway to like products, stores etc. only results in ads.2) Let's tighten our privacy settings this is creapy3) It assumes that people actually dutifully tag their content with locations, do likes on stuff like their dentists(seriously) etc.

In the end it may be a way to get at simple-minded people who tag everything they do. I am almost sure that is more people than I would hope there are. Actually not a bad idea should be easy to take their money. I just hope they do not increasingly force people to be more open about this stuff.

Can we just get filters for ads and status updates? I would love the ability to pick and choose the ad categories and filter out status updates by keywords such as "politics" or "religion" or "instagram"

However, before I left, I encouraged all my friends to make as much of their profile as possible visible to only their friends. I suspect a larger and larger part of the FB user base will do the same. Since Graph Search cannot see any of this info, it isn't that big of a deal, frankly. Let's just call it what it is: a device for targeted advertising.

I always assumed FB had this kind of search ability internally so they could target ads better.

It's funny. People have been talking about the power of "social search" for a couple years now, and FB is just now coming out with a tool to collect all the data it has at its disposal....when the general public is freaked out by privacy violations and many FB users are actively increasing their privacy protection and decreasing the amount of personal data online.

And here I was thinking Microsoft was the only tech giant prone to releasing products two years too late.

All this will do (for me anyway) is lead to Facebook "friend" pruning...

I'm already getting horrible "Recommended for you" posts showing up in my mobile feed with things that I have 0% interest in. This is probably just going to backfire if people are like me and start shrinking the "graph" data pool.

However, if a friend checks you in to a Mexican restaurant you attend with them and make that post public, that will likely feed into any graph searches your friends do. Likewise, it appears that any post that is public (I.e., technically shared with every Facebook user) can be involved in a query made by any user, regardless of their degree of direct social involvement with you.

If you don't want to be targeted by advertisers because of this, then don't make your personal contact information publicly accessible. Besides, on facebook, advertisers already have more effective and cheaper ways to target you.

Facebook is presenting this as a useful feature for users. However, the purpose of rolling it out to users and presenting a few examples of *how* to use it provides some cover for the creeping loss of privacy. This step will lessen the creepiness in the minds of some users and allow advertisers explicit access to the same information (happy shareholders).

However, if a friend checks you in to a Mexican restaurant you attend with them and make that post public, that will likely feed into any graph searches your friends do. Likewise, it appears that any post that is public (I.e., technically shared with every Facebook user) can be involved in a query made by any user, regardless of their degree of direct social involvement with you.

This is just ripe for abuse.

You can tell FB to require you to approve any time someone tags you in a photo, post, etc.

However, if a friend checks you in to a Mexican restaurant you attend with them and make that post public, that will likely feed into any graph searches your friends do. Likewise, it appears that any post that is public (I.e., technically shared with every Facebook user) can be involved in a query made by any user, regardless of their degree of direct social involvement with you.

This is just ripe for abuse.

You can tell FB to require you to approve any time someone tags you in a photo, post, etc.

Can we just get filters for ads and status updates? I would love the ability to pick and choose the ad categories and filter out status updates by keywords such as "politics" or "religion" or "instagram"

I thought of this same thing the other day. You know how much grief could have been cut out had people been able to just mute political comments from other people, rather than either mute them entirely or de-friend them? Also being able to filter out photos of people's kids and pets would be nice too, but then my news feed would be almost completely empty.

I'm disappointed that it won't immediately allow you to search through past posts of you or your friends (it's on their "to do" list). I've got 7+ years of posts and it can be onerous to try and find some salient tidbits from the past. Browsing Timeline is not the greatest solution.

That's the biggest reason I would use Graph Search and it's not available.

Until someone shows that people will pay directly for an advertisement free Facebook, we should maybe dial down the mocking of them creating tools to help advterisers- money has to come from somewhere.

You can tell FB to require you to approve any time someone tags you in a photo, post, etc.

No, you can't. You can tell Facebook not to include it in your timeline prior to your approval, and you can ask Facebook for any tag of you to be removed. You can't preempt people from tagging you in their photos, posts and statuses. Tags of you will still be visible in their timeline without your approval, unless you go to the trouble of removing them.

In the Q&A after the announcement, Mark Zuckerburg was pretty clear that this was a beta and they are interested in partnering with just about anybody. He specifically said they would love to work with Google.

I like how they pretend they made something cool when all they did was make database queries public in stead of hard-coded in. Not to say they probably didn't work hard at it, but its still a simple feature wrapped up in a pretty box.

Tin-foil hat time: This is just a public release of the back-end system they already wrote in for the government so they can perform searches when necessary.

I like how they pretend they made something cool when all they did was make database queries public in stead of hard-coded in. Not to say they probably didn't work hard at it, but its still a simple feature wrapped up in a pretty box.

Tin-foil hat time: This is just a public release of the back-end system they already wrote in for the government so they can perform searches when necessary.

If it supports natural language search queries, that's a pretty impressive development either way.